Most customers, by the time the musicians reach the second set, are to some extent inebriated. They don't care what you play anyway.

Making the complicated simple is true creativity.

If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music.

I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.

Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker's next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?